Project Hakosuka: ….almost going.

When we left things yesterday, the brakes were in good shape but the mastercyl needed rebuilding. The carbs had been sent off for refurbishing, but the setup that the car came with left something to be desired (apart from the fact that the carbs were leaking fuel!).

When floored, the carbs only went to 70% throttle, and the installation was a bit messy, with some cracked hoses and mismatched pipes. And then there is a wrongly sized fuel delivery pipe at the front of the engine that fouled the radiator hose. And it just looked messy.

But first, the throttle pedal (the most important component in the whole car!). It was not only badly adjusted, but wobbled from side to side when depressed.

The culprit is this…the section of the firewall where the accelerator pedal bracket bolts to was cracked. It’s double-skinned there, but the bolts were only tapped to the thin inner skin. This probably wasn’t an issue with the stock Hako’s Mustang-style rod linkage throttle, but mine had been converted to a more modern cable throttle, and obviously it had side loads that the stock mounting wasn’t designed for.

So I added an extra bolt in the middle, and put a spacer behind it give it more support. Feels okay, but I’m not convinced that I’ve fixed it and I think I’ll be revisiting this later.

The other good news are that the carbs are back! From this…

To this!

Carburettor Services had done a great job on the carbs, and bead blasting the castings made them like new. But the important thing was that there are all new seals inside, so the old fuel leak should be gone. The jetting of the carbs were a bit odd though: 40DCOE18s, with 32mm chokes, 145 mains, 220 correctors and 50F9 idle jets. Probably a bit too rich for a stockish 2.8L but when the car’s running I’ll get it on the dyno and see what’s what.

So on go the carbs with some new hoses…

And a new filter and more new hoses…

Then I bent the accelerator pedal to move it closer to the brake pedal for heel and toe, and also for more travel. From this (the pedal is only a couple of inches off the floor):

To this! The carb linkages also had to be adjusted too. Now that the pedal has more travel, the danger is that the carbs will reach full throttle before the pedal is all the way down to the carpet. This will bend all sorts of things inside the carbs over time. Luckily the carb linkages have so much adjustment that it was perfect after a lot of twiddling around.

I’m really quite chuffed with how it looks!

The other cool thing about the Hako are all the oldschool things in it. Like say, this interior window trim….plastic, right?

Actually it’s metal, and the leathergrain pattern is stamped into the steel. So to clean it up you polish it…and it doesn’t clip into place,it’s held in with screws!

At the moment, the car is engine-wise ready to go, but brakeless. Tomorrow the brake mastercyl should be ready and tomorrow night I’ll get some helpers and attempt to tune the Webers. After that, all we have to do it book ourselves in for engineer certifcation and we should be on the road!